Unified Communications

I’m out at the Broadsoft Connections conference in Phoenix, AZ and I’m trying to stay as productive as possible while meeting with senior-level executives at a number of Broadsoft’s partner companies.
The event kicked off with an introductory keynote by Broadsoft president and CEO Michael Tessler. The theme of this year’s conference, Scaling New Heights, was brought to life by a series of BMX bikers performing acrobatic feats — twists and turns and flips and jumps — on an indoor series of ramps set up for the event. Very exciting, and very fitting given Tessler’s subsequent comments.
Tessler spoke about the growth of the market, as well as the growth of the opportunity. He broke the market down for the standing room only audience, and settled on three key areas which will bear watching over the next few years.
He cited industry stats that show the potential size of the market as follows:
Hosted Voice/Hosted Applications: Infotek said that by 2010 marketplace for hosted voice and services would be $37 Billion, and the hosted voice part of that would be approximately $10B.
Business Trunking: Frost & Sullivan stated that connecting customer premise-based equipment to the network was an opportunity approaching $11B in 2006.
Residential Opportunity: Back in February, Ovum announced its view that the 2010 worldwide voice/residential opportunity would be equal to about $40 billion.
He summed up by telling the audience that the market is growing, and growing quickly.

Well at last it’s finally here. The Quickening!
Ok, Ok.. now I sound like Tom with his Braveheart quotes. For those who recognize it, I was referring to the original Highlander movie…
No. What I’m really getting at is that today is the official launch of Microsoft’s OCS 2007 unified communications solution.
Much has already been written about this impending launch over the past year or so, so perhaps there will not be any real news in today’s news.

Wow. I almost feel stranded, away from the Microsoft OCS news that my colleagues are covering so admirably.
See Rich’s blog entries on the subject, Tom’s blogs and OCS 2007 product review, and the following articles from Erik, Mae, Tim, Brian, and Stefania. Stefania also covers the news of Dell diving into the Unified Communications space here.
For the complete story click here.
I’ll have more to add on this later — there’s just so much news surrounding Microsoft’s launch.

Siemens is introducing its latest unified communications solution, Siemens HiPath OpenOffice ME.
The solution is designed to help small to medium businesses (in this case Siemens defines SMB as the 20–150 employee space) increase productivity and efficiency by enabling them with a variety of communications, collaboration and mobility features.
Currently slated for availability in February of 2008, Siemens expects the solution to price at approximately $270 per seat, before channel discounts. Siemens is currently expanding their channel in the United States to address the market opportunity.
I had a great talk with Siemens U.S. vice president of product and service management (enterprise) Al Baker who shared the big news with me.
If you click over to my columnist page, you’ll find a full article with more information about this latest UC initiative from Siemens.

Siemens Communications issued a release today, touting the fact that customer numbers for the Siemens HiPath 8000 Real-Time IP System have jumped over 400 percent in the last year, with success in all market sectors, and in enterprises of all sizes across all industries.
Furthermore, the company announced the latest HiPath 8000 feature release, including over 40 new Unified Communications (UC) Foundation features, such as enhanced one-number service for UC, larger business-groups for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), new class-leading business-continuity and disaster-recovery options, expanded ENUM, and UC interworking with IBM and Microsoft systems.
For more, check out Siemens Communications online.

Last week I posted an entry about Time Warner’s plans to implement a usage-based billing model with a test run set for Beaumont TX.
Well, here’s some more information on that subject.
Kudos to Slashdot for pointing out an An Ars Technica article that says that:
“…after many years of stagnation, the U.S. broadband landscape is finally 'primed for change.’”
The article argues that cable and DSL — while they currently enjoy near monopoly status — are not going to be the only game in town for long, with widespread WiMAX deployments imminent and the so called white-space broadband that can be offered by whoever wins the 700 MHz auction. This doesn’t take into account Verizon’s FiOS offering as well as AT&T’s U-Verse.
The Ars Technica piece states that if these
“…solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits, capped cable broadband service like Time Warner has planned is likely to be unattractive, to say the least.
It’s a sobering reminder to the Cable and DSL providers that they should be investing in new technologies and new methods of capturing new customers and serving existing ones.
Stay tuned, I’m sure this story has legs…

Siemens Communications today announced the next phase in its ongoing transformation into a software-oriented company with the launch of the new unified communications software platform, OpenScape Unified Communications Server.
A key element of Siemens' Open Communications plan is the ability to embrace third-party VoIP or legacy PBX environments. To that end today’s announcement holds that OpenScape UC Server can operate in virtually any existing IT or telephony environment.
For more on this exciting news in unified communications, check out the following report.

Rich writes about Aspect and their move into Unified Communications for the contact center on his blog.
Aspect today announced their all-in-one, IT-ready Aspect Unified IP and PerformanceEdge solutions designed to help power unified communications for the contact center.
According to Rich:
Aspect's unified communications solutions bridge the divide between the contact center and the rest of the organization in a way that allows every person in an organization to become an integral part of the contact center in a manner that maximizes efficiency, customer service and sales levels.
To read the rest of Rich’s insightful look at the significance of this news, check out his blog.

I had the occasion to visit with Dimension Data’s Mark Slaga this morning at that company’s Perspectives event at the Batterymarch Conference Center in Boston.
Slaga, the company’s chief technology officer as well as their chief information officer is certainly someone to chat with if you want to know what’s really going on in the market. You see last week Slaga and his team received a platinum phone from Cisco based on the fact that of the 17 million Cisco IP Phones out there, Dimension Data has deployed 1 million of them worldwide.
Dimension Data is a global IT solutions and systems integration firm, whose 11,000 employees plan, build, support and manage IT infrastructure solutions that help over 6,000 clients achieve their business goals.
According to Slaga, the company grew up on networking and has since moved into converged communications and contact centers, security, and data center technology.
The company maintains a consistent methodology and approach to planning building and supporting their customers IT solutions. The broad experience of thousands of customers has positioned Dimension Data to truly understand how unified communications (UC) is growing and where it’s going.
Slaga explained how VoIP is becoming commoditized, and how Dimension Data views applications such as UC and contact center as differentiators and thus a critically important part of their business.
Slaga’s role as CTO dictates that he spends time with clients and vendors, to listen and to gain an understanding of the market opportunities and challenges they’re facing.
His job as CIO is to take that understanding and make the solutions that he pitches to his customers, work internally at Dimension Data.
Of course, the nature of Dimension Data’s global footprint ensures that they face many of the same challenges that their large customers face.
Among the trends Slaga is seeing, is the continued growth of VoIP. Perhaps more important he sees the opportunity to help confused clients see the light.
As clients adopt applications such as VoIP, UC, instant messaging (IM) they’re starting to see what UC means.

Furthermore, the company announced that it's revamping its Sipera VIPER Engine (the core security engine for Sipera IPCS appliances), to address the most recent vulnerabilities and threats, adding the capability to download security signatures automatically, and enhanced anomaly detection capabilities against zero day attacks.

Lastly Sipera announced enhanced support for enterprises that have deployed Avaya teleworker and mobile solutions, allowing them to secure their employees' mobile workspaces.